From Content to CTR: Nailing Ecommerce SEO In 2025

In the lead up to our ecommerce SEO live audit series in partnership with Women in Tech SEO, this week we welcome Amanda Walls to share her insights on how to win at ecommerce SEO in 2025.

Ecommerce SEO has been a very hot topic of conversation of late. With so many Google updates to contend with, from algorithm updates through to SGE, through to “Helpful Content”, it’s no surprise that we are now having to be increasingly agile with our strategies, whilst remaining faithful to the core principles of SEO. 

As we head into 2025, it’s never been more important to have a solid SEO foundation in place for your ecommerce strategy. So, if you are looking to improve your online performance or just looking to give your strategy a headstart, here are five key elements for effective ecommerce SEO.

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5 essentials for ecommerce SEO in 2025:

• Improving PLPs and website performance
• Building E-E-A-T and external trust
• Growing importance of user intent and CTR
• Mastering faceted navigation
• Optimising blog content

1. Improving product landing pages and website performance 

In the algorithm leak of 2024, it was highlighted that Google places a key focus on product landing pages and, as such, this now matters more than ever. In many instances, PLPs act as the first point of entry for users searching for specific products, so optimisation of these pages should really encompass both SEO and CRO to maximise impact and return. 

Best practice for product landing pages

• Create unique (where possible) and compelling product descriptions - These should highlight key features of the product, and be descriptive enough for Google to know what the product is and be able to return it in the search results.
  
  
• Design intuitive navigation - Ensure that categories and filters are clear and logical, use breadcrumbs for internal linking, and evaluate the depth of these categories in relation to the homepage.
  
  
• Ensure clear product categorisation - Organise products in a digestible manner, with a clear hierarchy of sub-categories. Additionally, make sure to avoid too much product overlap between categories.
  
  
• Optimise for relevance - The content and imagery on PLPs should be entirely relevant to the product, using internal linking to tie the product page together with any other guide or review style content which could support purchase behaviours. 

• Optimise for speed - The speed at which the page loads plays an important role in user engagement, so ensure the website is fast and that all elements load well. Not sure how to check? Consider using a tool like Lighthouse to take a more in-depth look at specific speed issues.

Ensuring that users are able to find the information that they need above the fold quickly, such as in this example, is also favourable to improve dwell-time and boost conversion rate:

Tips for speed optimisation

Website performance goes hand in hand with optimisation for product landing pages and, in addition to speed improvements, you should look at the following elements: 

• A/B testing - It’s important to undertake some testing on your PLPs from a conversion optimisation perspective. But this can also give you an insight as to which pages are best serving the user's needs and playing an effective role in ranking. Therefore, don’t be afraid to test, and allow yourself enough time to properly measure the outcomes of these tests.
  
  
• CTR - Long evaluated as a possible ranking factor, a strong CTR helps showcase to Google that your pages are valuable and relevant to the user. In addition to optimising for direct performance, also enhance your meta data to help showcase its relevance and fully utilise your shop window.
  
  
• Image optimisation - Use next-gen formats for images to enhance the overall low speed and consider the use of lazy-loading to prioritise the load and speed of content above the fold. Also, basic optimisations like alt text and written content can help Google to understand what your images are and boost the relevance of your product landing pages.
  
  
• Schema mark-up - Your products need to be effectively marked up with schema. Google has a great guide showcasing the different types of markup you can use to promote the content on your product landing pages - have a look through and see which ones you can add!

While mentioned above, speed and code coverage analysis have become key focuses of ecommerce SEO strategies. The idea, to remove unused JavaScript and CSS, is a great way to speed up a page without losing any important elements and will improve the overall SEO across your ecommerce website.

If you haven’t come across code coverage analysis before, you can access it through Chrome Developer Tools. To do so, record a session on the website in question; during the recording, the tool will highlight the used and unused javascript and you can then go through and remove or optimise unused code. This is an effective way to improve the speed of your website without compromising on performance - rather, you are just removing redundant elements. 

Alternatively, you can use Sitebulb’s in-built code coverage analysis. 

2. Building E-E-A-T and external trust 

E-E-A-T has been the buzzword of SEO for a long time now and the importance of this approach does also apply in the ecommerce space. 

There are many ways that you can build E-E-A-T but some lend themselves better to ecommerce than others. 

User-generated content

UGC is a fantastic way to build on experience, trust and authority all at once and the best part is that you are also resonating with your audience by showcasing this information through someone just like them! Encourage users to leave product reviews and highlight these on the product landing pages - give users a reason to do so and don’t be afraid to collate these at product level if you can. 

Adding photos and videos submitted by customers can also help to build authenticity and show shoppers what the products look like in real life. Structured data can also be implemented here to help improve the visibility of these within the search results. NB: You can use Sitebulb’s structured data checker to validate your markup against Google and Schema guidelines.

Creating expert content

Creating expert-led content is a great way to build up your expertise while also adding something genuinely useful to the website. This could be expert advice in the form of blog content, buying guides, how-to articles and product comparisons, or simply highlighting experts that you have worked with on the creation of the product. When creating expert-led content, remember that different formats target different audiences; think first about what your audience’s goal is and then choose a content format accordingly. 

Expertise can be built on and off-site, and utilising digital PR to leverage your expert-led content is a good way to showcase this to a wider audience and build your crucial external reputation. Leverage the valuable content you have created and share it with the world. This will not only raise awareness for your brand, but may also provide a genuine answer to a user’s question! 

Remember to highlight the credentials of the person writing the content where possible, especially if they are a subject matter expert.Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines mention that they want to know about the person who has created the content and why they have the expertise to do so. Linking out to a separate author profile listing the user’s credentials can also be a nice way to back this up. 

Showcase accreditations or just tell users why they should trust you 

Does your business have accreditations? If so, show them off! Make it easy for a user to understand why they should trust you both from a product quality perspective and a business perspective. Building out your “Meet The Team” page is an efficient way to help users understand the people behind the business so they can confidently trust in you. 

Be transparent in your business practices. To do so, include detailed shipping, return and warranty policies on your website so you are setting clear expectations, and provide clear contact information on every page in case something should go wrong. 

If you don’t have accreditations then tell people why they should trust you. Have you been in business x number of years, or supplied x number of customers? Or, perhaps you have x number of five star reviews. Don’t be afraid to make this visible on your website. 

Strengthen your brand reputation 

E-E-A-T signals are built on-site and off-site and it’s important to strengthen your off-site brand reputation signals to boost the trust of your brand as a whole. Tried and tested external product reviews, sharing your expertise with the wider audience and newsjacking are all great ways to build brand awareness, whilst showcasing your E-E-A-T skills at the same time.

3. Growing importance of user intent and enhancing CTR

Aligning content and user journey with your user intent type (informational/navigational/transactional) is increasingly important for improving user experience and SEO signals. Google wants to send the user to the best possible result for their search at the precise moment they are searching for it; from a webmaster’s perspective, this means that we should be aligning our user journey and content to match what a user wants at each stage of the funnel.

Recent Google Algorithms, including Panda, Hummingbird, RankBrain, BERT, Core Web Vitals and Multimodal Search (MUM) have all shown an interest in user intent. Focuses vary between determining the intent of content, imagery or semantic links but all this goes to show the importance that Google is placing on this approach.

In SEO specifically, we have seen Google more closely align with websites that better match user intent, along with seeing user intents shift over a period of time. Therefore, it’s important to stay relevant to what users want. This being said, let’s run through a few ways we can stay ahead of the curve with user intent: 

Focusing on CTR improvements

As mentioned earlier in the article, CTR has long been mooted as having an impact on SEO performance. Aligning content with your user’s journey and targeting your strategy to improve user intent is one way to improve this CTR, because the “shop window” or meta that you display within the search results will likely be directly-related to what the user is looking for. 

Focus on optimising meta descriptions and page titles. This might seem basic, but it’s a fundamental way to remind users that you are a match for their question - and also a great way to showcase any key USPs of your brand.

On-page optimisation

Optimising on-page for user intent means matching the layout, structure and content of the page to match what the user is looking for - and this does a lot more than just create effective content. The way that we layout the page, together with the information available about products, size of fonts and whether or not we use dropdowns, all play a part in helping to match user intent. Equally, so does the way the content is formatted, and Chloe Ivy Rose’s Whiteboard Friday is a helpful explanation of how to be aware of reading patterns for content consumption. 

Source: https://moz.com/blog/reading-patterns-whiteboard-friday

Lay out your pages clearly, using good H1, H2 tagged headings and put the most important information above the fold. This may go without saying but, basic intent mapping (e.g. starting with a clear definition or opening with a clear product description) is often neglected despite being an easy way to make quick gains. 

Search journey mapping

When understanding user intent, it’s essential to map your user journey. This guarantees that the user intent matches what the searcher is looking for and helps to push users down the conversion funnel:

• Navigational - A user is searching for something specific, like a particular product page, to find out more about the business.
  
  
• Informational - A user is looking to find out more information prior to making a conversion; this could be reading more about the product or how it is utilised on a blog page, or simply looking for product details.
  
  
• Transactional - The user is ready to make a purchase and is simply looking to do so.

Each of the above stages plays an important role in the consumption process - so, ensure that both your content and user intent covers each stage to enhance CTR, user experience and CRO.

A note on personalisation 

I’ve attended a number of events this year where personalisation has been a hot topic, and it now appears to be one of the most popular ways to align directly with user intent in 2025. Leveraging AI to analyse user behaviour and provide more targeted suggestions is proving effective in the ecommerce space and there are a number of ways to do this:

• Personalising your basket approach to new/returning customers
• Creating unique user journeys for users that enter at different touchpoints 
• Implementing clever ways to create “value-adds” for the basket to reduce drop off rate 

Each of these will not only help your user intent match, but also your CRO. 

4. Mastering Faceted Navigation

In order for something to return in the search results, it needs to be found and therefore, exist within Google’s “index” of websites. This may sound simple but, when you are faced with this on a large ecommerce website, there can be numerous challenges to overcome. One of the biggest being handling faceted navigation as a large ecommerce store. 

In 2025, this will continue to a pressing topic and there are a few techniques you can use to address this:

Fixing Wasted Crawl Budget

In general, the nature of faceted navigation means it generates a large number of URL variations through the filter system. If these aren’t correctly handled within Google, it can lead to a large number of variations across each URL and literally hundreds of thousands of pages to crawl. 

While this often improves user experience, it can mean that crawl budget is wasted on pages that offer little-to-no value and even cause robots to get stuck and miss crawling important parts of the website. To fix this, make sure you’re always using canonical tags appropriately, apply URL parameters where needed, or use the robots.txt file to block the crawl at source.

Index Bloat

Similarly, if there are too many low-value or redundant pages indexed, you can be left with index bloat. This unfortunate-sounding name simply means that the high-priority pages you want to be crawled are falling by the wayside and preventing important product or category pages being indexed. 

You can address this by implementing an XML sitemap that excludes the faceted navigation URLs; this will help to showcase the important pages, particularly if you further enhance it using the ‘priorities’ feature. Additionally, you can use your structure and navigation to prioritise key pages and implement structured data to give better guidance to search engines. 

Dealing With Thin Or Duplicate Content

When multiple pages are created and indexed, they can often end up with very similar or identical content, especially if fresh content hasn’t been written for these pages. If this is the case, it’s advisable to either consolidate similar pages with canonical tags, or map the pages based on the priorities above. This will ensure that unrequired individual pages are no-indexed, and you can then create a corresponding content strategy for those pages that need it. 

Poor Internal Linking

Another challenge of faceted navigation is that it can upset the balance of internal linking. Creating thousands of new urls can result in a fairly even priority level across the website, meaning that some of your key pages are not crawled - holding back performance. Implementing a contextualised internal links review can help to resolve this and check all your key pages are well linked to. Doing so at the same time as reviewing the faceted navigation will help to improve indexation and guarantee that all your key pages are being crawled. 

5. Optimising Blog Content

The final piece of the puzzle for ecommerce SEO is optimising blog content. This has a whole host of benefits; not only does it help to provide supporting information which will enhance E-E-A-T signals, but it also allows you to capitalise on long-tail opportunities and promote information gain which will work closely with large language models. Tackle blog optimisation with the following considerations in mind:

Boosting E-E-A-T

It’s that buzzword again - but E-E-A-T is important in the ecommerce space, especially if your website falls into YMYL! By optimising blog content effectively you can showcase expertise, authority and trust all in one go and, in some cases, you can even showcase experience too using user-generated content and reviews. And, with the increasing focus on experience in recent algorithm updates, this is essential to demonstrate. 

Capitalise on long-tail opportunity

Blogs offer a wealth of long-tail opportunity and you can capitalise on this by including searches such as:

• “Vintage style leather jackets for women”
• “Eco-friendly gym wear”
• “Kids organic cotton pajamas”

By creating content that focuses on these topics, you not only help to improve the E-E-A-T (as above) but also target users further up the funnel with relevant content - all working to increase your brand awareness and visibility. 

Information Gain

Information gain has come to prominence a lot this year and will continue to be a focus in 2025; more and more we are seeing SEOs moving towards focusing on information gain rather than “cookie cutter” information as this feeds Google’s large language models and provides real value by bringing new information to the conversation.

Throughout your ecommerce content, having a key focus on information gain will ensure that your content stays fresh, relevant and most importantly adds something new to the conversation. This is especially important in light of Google’s AI product, which will continue to grow moving forwards.

Keep your content refreshed 

On the topic of information gain, Google loves new content and updated content, so one key project for 2025 could be a content strategy, looking to refresh your existing content to better match user intent. Do a quick audit of existing content - do you still need it? What is the purpose of it? This is called a content “prune” and it helps to remove any thin content or blogs that are no longer serving their purpose, as well as identifying opportunities for quick win blog updates which will draw in further long-tail traffic. 

Summary

Creating your ecommerce SEO strategy in 2025 continues to centre around the following 4 key areas:

1. Delivering a solid user experience
2. Ensuring that Google can access priority pages by creating effective internal linking and derivatives to prevent index bloat and low quality indexation 
3. Creating a great on-page experience by strengthening product pages
4. Delivering E-E-A-T signals that build trust and external reputation 

Implementing these factors into your strategy will not only create solid SEO performance but also drive that ever-important increase in sales and revenue.

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